One of the things I've noticed many times over the last year working with different orchestrators, distributed cloud platforms and container systems is that without proper monitoring and logging, you'll be in a world of pain when trouble hits you. A solution to this problem can come in many shapes and with the help of many tools and services. In this article I'm focusing on Microsoft Log Analytics which has support for monitoring Kubernetes (and other systems). AKS Kubernetes monitoring: Pre-requisites for this post A short list of things you'll need before you get started: An Azure Container Service (AKS)…
Updated 2018-03-23: With the latest version of the CLI the get-versions command has been replaced with get-upgrades in regards to seeing what upgrades are available. Thanks to my buddy Thorsten for the heads up. The details below has been updated to accomodate these changes. While working a lot with AKS and Kubernetes the last couple of months, I've found it to be a pretty slick experience using the CLI even if it still has some room for improvement. The question of how to upgrade Kubernetes running in an Azure AKS cluster came up a few times both offline and online,…
This article will talk a little bit about how to get started with the new Azure Container Services (AKS). In recent months I've put quite some efforts into AKS and put it through the ring of fire and rigorous tests. So far, so good. With my R&D I've found some gotchas and had to figure quite some things out, but in the end the setup and configuration is pretty straight forward - and the preview of AKS has significantly improved since I started using it. In this post I will cover: Ramp up with pre-requisites (Azure CLI, AKS…
1. Introduction In this post we'll explore how easy it is to actually build a bot for Microsoft Teams using the Microsoft Bot Framework, which can be found here https://dev.botframework.com. This post is meant as a starting point for building bots and conversational helpers using the Microsoft Bot Framwork. Of course, it doesn't have to be limited to the Microsoft Teams channel, it can be targeting Slack, Skype or any other available distribution channel. For the sake of this post, I'll show how to build it and use it with Teams initially. 1.1 The bot: Nerdibot…
Introduction In this article I'll walk you through how to set up a Docker Swarm in Azure through the Docker Cloud service. There's plenty of places to host your docker containers, in this post I'm covering the Docker Cloud option with the Swarm Mode on Azure. I will soon post a few guides for ACS (Azure Container Service) and AKS (Managed Kubernetes on Azure Container Service) which also touches upon how to deploy and host your containerized solutions in the Azure cloud. For the sake of this post, I've created a super-simple console application that outputs messages to an Azure…
I've been spending a lot of time with .NET Core, Docker, a plenitude of Azure services, various cloud systems and API's. The common denominator of all my projects of late, is that they're all touching Docker in one way or the other. With Docker there's plenty of ways to do things. This post is simply a tip if you're using VSCode and also working with Docker to some extent; It'll help with some basic tasks. Docker Extension for Visual Studio Code, installation Press Ctrl + P (Windows) Type ext install vscode-docker Select and install the extension (as of this writing it's…
If you're in this sphere, I am pretty sure you've also been either attending on-site, virtually attending or at least heard about what Build 2017 from Microsoft had to offer last week. With this post I simply want to emphasize on some of the features and announcements that Microsoft did recently that I really liked. There was a lot more happening, but these are my key takeaways. Enjoy. Azure Cloud Shell A while ago I tweeted about a nice way Microsoft implemented a feature-teaser in the Azure Portal: Nice way to sneak a promo for #BUILD2017 into the #Azure Portal.…
Note. This episode was recorded 2017-02-19 This time I’m catching up with Eric Overfield. We're talking about the benefits of using Office 365 Patterns and Practices in your organization, and what it has to offer. Eric is sharing his best tips on what the core benefits are, where to find more information about it, etc. Episode Guest, Eric Overfield PixelMill Co-Founder, SharePoint Branding and UI Designer, Builder and Creator. In 2016, Microsoft recognized Eric's contributions to SharePoint and Office 365 by awarding him as a Microsoft MVP, and then in 2017, Microsoft recognized his community leadership and general technology…